Apple without Jobs is “weird,” says chairman, but it’s not in trouble

Arthur Levinson speaks up about advising the company post-Steve Jobs.

Running Apple’s board of directors without Steve Jobs around has been “weird” for its chairman, Arthur Levinson, according to an interview he gave at the Stanford Graduate School of Business Tuesday reported by CNN. Levinson stated that the Jobs the public knew was “not, for the most part, the Steve Jobs that I knew,” and that he feels Apple’s short-term earnings are not cause for concern.

Levinson called Jobs a “one of a kind guy.” Of attending board of director meetings since Jobs passed away in October 2011, Levinson said, “ I’m still not to the point where I walk into that board room and don’t miss Steve.” Levinson was a member of the board when Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO and recommended Tim Cook as his successor, per a plan that the board had previously established.

Levinson further stated that he didn’t feel Apple’s recent quarter was an appropriate indicator regarding the company’s long-term performance. He stated that there are “long-term signs of how a company is doing… whether or not Apple sells 47 or 48 million iPhones—let somebody else worry about that.”

Apple pulled out of a dip in iPhone sales from the second to fourth quarter in 2012 (with 26.9 million iPhones sold in Q4 2012) to 47.8 million in Q1 2013. Still, the company’s profit was flat year-over-year, despite revenue growth of 17.7 percent. Despite the fact that Levinson feels the sales are not long-term success indicators, the company’s stock dropped 10 percent after the Q1 2013 earnings announcements.

Its very difficult for a company to take a long term view to its success. I think most will argue that current day sales = long term success. I would agree with the chairman that this is a bad indicator of long term viability.

It has more to do with what products are in the pipeline for the company, how heavily they invest in R&D, the level of service they provide to the customer, having a focused and well thought out strategy, and a plethora of many other factors of which current day sales is just one.

The problem is the stock market tends to want immediate returns and constant signs of growth. This is unrealistic in just about any company in any industry. Maybe the most important factor to judging long term growth is a company's ability to appease the stockholder enough so they don't intrude upon the factors mentioned above? Refusing stock splits and allowing share prices to rise used to keep the "average, emotional lone stockholder" at bay but institutional investors want their returns now too.

Sounds like a co-dependent spouse or child of a recently deceased person.SERIOUSLY NOT something a chairman or leader/manager should be saying.

Who wants to trust a company where their leaders need someone to hero-worship and/or hold their hand all the time??

Project much?

People get used to things. People suffer grief, even in small doses, when things change.

I've lost my parents. The same kind of 'shock' occurs when you reach into your pocket and find your car keys missing as when you walk into a room and find your parents missing. The difference is scale. I think the same applies here.

I beg differ. Apple with Jobs was just a different kind of weird. I think one thing that pretty much everyone can agree on and is detailed extensively in Isaacson's book is that in both good ways and bad Jobs, and by extension Apple, was anything but "normal."

Sounds like a co-dependent spouse or child of a recently deceased person.SERIOUSLY NOT something a chairman or leader/manager should be saying.

Who wants to trust a company where their leaders need someone to hero-worship and/or hold their hand all the time??

Project much?

People get used to things. People suffer grief, even in small doses, when things change.

I've lost my parents. The same kind of 'shock' occurs when you reach into your pocket and find your car keys missing as when you walk into a room and find your parents missing. The difference is scale. I think the same applies here.

Exactly. All Levinson is saying is that after many years of walking into the boardroom and seeing Steve, it's been a bit discombobulating to not have him there. And it's only been a bit over a year since he died.

Sounds like a co-dependent spouse or child of a recently deceased person.SERIOUSLY NOT something a chairman or leader/manager should be saying.

Who wants to trust a company where their leaders need someone to hero-worship and/or hold their hand all the time??

Project much?

People get used to things. People suffer grief, even in small doses, when things change.

I've lost my parents. The same kind of 'shock' occurs when you reach into your pocket and find your car keys missing as when you walk into a room and find your parents missing. The difference is scale. I think the same applies here.

I think his point is that Apple seems to be so much in the spotlight when other companies have gone threw the same thing. It does feel like Jobs name keeps coming up constantly for any little thing. Not saying its bad , but it paints a picture that they cannot survive without him.

Sounds like a co-dependent spouse or child of a recently deceased person.SERIOUSLY NOT something a chairman or leader/manager should be saying.

Who wants to trust a company where their leaders need someone to hero-worship and/or hold their hand all the time??

Project much?

People get used to things. People suffer grief, even in small doses, when things change.

I've lost my parents. The same kind of 'shock' occurs when you reach into your pocket and find your car keys missing as when you walk into a room and find your parents missing. The difference is scale. I think the same applies here.

I think his point is that Apple seems to be so much in the spotlight when other companies have gone threw the same thing. It does feel like Jobs name keeps coming up constantly for any little thing. Not saying its bad , but it paints a picture that they cannot survive without him.

No it doesn't, not any more than any one of us can survive without a loved one, which is one extreme, to the other where none of us can survive without internet access, a much more mundane example.

I would assume that Levinson, as Apple’s board of directors, might know something about future Apple products which would not be known by the general public. So, his prediction of better long-term performance might turn out to be accurate.

Also, I think it's important to realize that what the stock market does in a few days of trading does not necessarily predict the performance of a company over the next 5 years. Because current sales and profits do not necessarily = what they will be the next couple of years.

... to the other where none of us can survive without internet access, a much more mundane example.

Speak for yourself, then. I wonder how those people in 3rd world countries get by without internet access...

That's my point. Loss requires you have something.

That's the definition of loss.

Grief is the reaction to loss.

Everyone on this thread has to have internet access to be reading and writing. Whether your grief is small or large is irrelevant, the point is that you will have a reaction because whatever you do cannot be the same since your actions will be based upon whatever normal you have reliant upon the lost thing.

3rd world countries without internet access aren't losing anything when cut off to internet access.

What? Not in trouble? Lion and Mountain Lion are pretty much garbage - with iOS UI metaphors from a screen real estate constrained, memory constrained device pushed onto the desktop and more useless animation that you can't turn off than I can shake a stick at.

The machines of today with SSDs and 16 GB of RAM are SLOWER on Lion and Mountain Lion than they were with Leopard and Snow Leopard.

I booted a 5 year old Macbook Pro to Tiger and Safari launched in one bounce. Using Mountain Lion, In Xcode, I get the spinning wheel of death simply searching the documentation on a modern Mac with an SSD and 16GB of RAM!

iTunes 11 is complete visual and functional GARBAGE, using the nonstandard Arial font on the Mac, deleting files and offering no easy way back to the previous version that actually didn't delete all my years of podcast files.

Apple is trying to tell us that "unexpected quitting of applications enhances the user experience" on Mac OS. It's in the documentation. Really. For TextEdit this "great functionality" saves 9 MB of RAM and disables the GUI while the apps still stay running in RAM. This is simply a horrible user experience.

What is plain is that the fear of Steve is gone and people in management at Apple are allowing crap to ship so that they can collect their bonuses. I can't use the GUI in Lion and Mountain Lion, because buttons that are active are grayed out enough to make the UI state vague-er to the eye, distracting animations of items are flying all over my 27 inch screen and key functionality of the OS and Finder are simply broken and do not offer ANY improvements over Snow Leopard that help me get my job done better.

iTunes 11 removing the button background of the buttons and replacing them with flat graphics REMOVES context from the UI and introduces doubt into the mind of the user. "Are these just graphics or are they clickable items?"

I've seen nothing good coming from Apple and shipping on time with stable functionality starting with Lion. Xcode crashes like mad, iTunes can easily delete entire podcast feeds and the GUI looks amateurish, core usability in the Mac OS has taken a back seat to "make this look like iOS and make it familiar to Windows users", creating a crappy experience for users on what used to be my favorite computer OS.

OC is quite right about the personal, and this sense of doing familiar things but realizing as you do them that something, in fact someone, is missing is something we all have to go through. Whether it is parents, friends, relationships, our short lived animal companions. Its a personal comment and has little to do with Apple's fortunes after Jobs. Of course he would feel that way, so would we all.

How Apple will do post-Jobs? Well, they have inherited from him the problems success brings. Even had he remained, the issues he would have had to manage would have been completely different from those he had so much success with in the past. It was probably time for a new approach regardless of health issues.

I don't agree with the general view here that the stock market is entirely short term oriented. Like all human affairs it is subject to 'popular delusions and the madness of crowds', but these are more commonly getting maniacally excited on the up or the downside about the medium term or long term fortunes of a particular company or technology. There's a tendency for followers of charismatic companies to applaud the market's prescience on the way up and to condemn it for short termism on the way down. The way that Apple has moved in quite clear trendlines is a sign that the long term prospects have dominated its market valuation in recent years.

Whether investors have got them right or wrong is another matter, but that seems to have been the motivating factor. Its quite small signs that all may not be well with the medium to longer term that has caused the recent fall out of bed.

I would assume that Levinson, as Apple’s board of directors, might know something about future Apple products which would not be known by the general public. So, his prediction of better long-term performance might turn out to be accurate.

Also, I think it's important to realize that what the stock market does in a few days of trading does not necessarily predict the performance of a company over the next 5 years. Because current sales and profits do not necessarily = what they will be the next couple of years.

Particularly when it the results of a few large institutional investors getting cold feet, who then bought into Google to nick its price up.

Thank them; it creates an opportunity for other to make a long term buy when Apple's stock bottoms out in the current cycle and then heads up again.

In all seriousness, it's more like the 300 w/o Leonidas. The 300 would still be a lean mean fighting force w/o him but he made them so much more effective. He was their heart and soul. The same applies to Jobs. The guy may have been a royal douchebag but he knew how to run Apple. He really was the heart and soul of Apple. I'd love to hear a few long time employees discuss candidly how the culture at Apple has changed since his passing.